Possession

The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore is to sterilize the person one loves
- Albert Camus

How brutal yet how honest! These lines by Camus got me thinking about the thin line between love and possession. It's an incredible art form and a stringent discipline to love someone yet let him or her have the freedom to be. It's so easy to be possessive - to want someone you love to be a slave to your emotions or have them feel for you just as strongly as you feel for them and in the same way.

It's tough to realize that we all have different ways of loving and different doesn't mean less. So many of us make our self miserable thinking that the object of our affections does not love us with the same intensity as we do. That they may exist in a world without us, that the sun will continue to rise if we weren't there. That life would go on without us, because isn't it true that we want the person we love, to be incapacitated without us, completely helpless and lost – unable to go on?

That is the ultimate proof that someone loves us. Of course not everybody is like this.

I used to be but I can proudly say that I have changed, still regress at times but much improved. It took strict endeavor and deep introspection, and of course life happens and changes so many of our perspectives. Sometimes it turns a full 360 degrees and takes us to the spot that we were before and makes us stand on the opposite side, holds out a mirror and we gasp. Only when our actions are reflected in the other person do we realize.

It's strange how when we fall in love with someone it's because of who they are and as soon as we have them we immediately start trying to change them.

To love someone is to be incredibly brave, brave enough to give them the space they need to be who they are and not possessing them so completely that they lose themselves.

I wonder where it starts?
The possessiveness. Is it a lack of belief in our self?
Do we think that until and unless we own someone completely where they only see us and close themselves to the rest of the world, we'll lose them?

In this way I think marriage is the trickiest institution because the lines are very thin... how possessive can you be and how possessive should you be? Or should you be at all.

I guess this is where trust comes in but a lack of trust sometimes is not because of what the other person has done it stems out of one's own insecurities.